Reaction to Uber Tactics Highlights Tech Journalists’ Fine Line Between Critic and Booster

Monday night, BuzzFeed reported that an Uber executive had considered investigating the private life of the tech journalist Sarah Lacy because of her negative coverage of the company. Ms. Lacy responded almost instantaneously — and she was not happy.

In a podcast, Ms. Lacy, the founder and editor in chief of the Silicon Valley news website PandoDaily, and Paul Carr, her co-host, called Uber “awful,” “evil” and “nasty.” They also reserved a portion of their scathing rant for their fellow tech writers, who, they said, had gone too soft on Uber.

“There are a lot of journalists going after it, but it is not ReCode, not TechCrunch, not any of the tech press,” said Ms. Lacy, 38, who lives in San Francisco.

Mr. Carr agreed. “When I saw these puff pieces from other so-called journalists, I thought to myself, Why won’t they do basic journalism?” Then he added that he now knew the answer: “Either you do a puff piece, or we’ll come after you.”

The vitriolic podcast — and the reaction to the Uber executive’s comments — opened a window into the competitive and sometimes incestuous group of publications that have grown up to cover Silicon Valley. An expanding list of publications, including the Gawker Media website Valleywag, the AOL-owned site TechCrunch, Vox Media’s outlet The Verge, The Information, CNET and ReCode, are jockeying for scoops and access to the tech industry’s hottest companies and executives.

“They have all carved their own niche, but there is also a lot of overlap,” said Matthew Panzarino, co-editor of TechCrunch. “It is a tight-knit community, and a lot of reporters are reporting the same thing.”

To further complicate matters, many of these publications make a significant portion of their revenue from live events and conferences that feature appearances by the big-name tech executives they cover. Some publications also rely on investments from venture capital firms that have stakes in the start-ups they cover.

Pando, for example, which was started in 2012, has received nearly $4 million in funding from multiple venture firms, according to Ms. Lacy. One of those firms, Andreessen Horowitz, also has a stake in Lyft, Uber’s main competitor. Other Pando backers, like First Round Capital, have invested in Uber.

Ms. Lacy says her challenge in balancing competing interests was no different from that of reporters who cover Washington or Hollywood. “For journalists, there has always been a slippery slope between being an insider and getting really good material and being too close to your sources,” she said.

She has been harder on Uber than most of her tech peers have, Ms. Lacy said, which is perhaps why she was specifically named by the Uber executive, Emil Michael.

In a column published on Pando in October, Ms. Lacy reacted to reports that the company’s founder and chief executive, Travis Kalanick, had called the company “Boober” because it helped him get women, and to other reports about accusations by female passengers that Uber drivers had assaulted them. Ms. Lacy said she was deleting the Uber app from her smartphone and called for others to do the same.

The account of Mr. Michael’s remarks came from Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed. Mr. Smith spoke to Mr. Michael at a private dinner last Friday at the Waverly Inn in Manhattan. He later reported that Mr. Michael was contemplating spending $1 million to dig up dirt on reporters who, he said, had unfairly criticized the company, mentioning Ms. Lacy in particular.

BuzzFeed reported that Mr. Michael had “expressed outrage” at Ms. Lacy’s column and said that “women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers.” The article added that he had said he thought Ms. Lacy “should be held ‘personally responsible’ for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.”

Mr. Michael apologized personally to Ms. Lacy by email on Tuesday after she refused to speak with him off the record on the phone.

Uber declined a request to discuss why Mr. Michael had singled out Ms. Lacy, but her opinionated style of journalism has made her a lightning rod for negative attention throughout her career. She rose to prominence after a live interview she conducted with Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2008. Members of the audience apparently felt she was interrupting Mr. Zuckerberg too much and took her to task for it on Twitter.

By her own account, Ms. Lacy’s style has earned her enemies not just among tech executives but also among her peers and the general public. “I have had people writing on blogs and on Twitter and everywhere over my career about how they are going to gang-rape me. I have had death threats. I daily have people tweeting horrible things about me,” she said in her podcast.

Now she is pushing back. “I would like to see people who call themselves journalists, like Kara Swisher, who sat onstage mooning at Travis, and even her own staff was embarrassed she couldn’t ask him a hard question,” she said, referring to a June interview in which Ms. Swisher, co-founder of ReCode, interviewed the Uber founder at a live event. “How does she feel about him doing that to journalists?”

Ms. Swisher declined to comment on Ms. Lacy but has been publicly supportive of her on Twitter since Monday. (Ms. Lacy wrote to say that she has appreciated Ms. Swisher’s support and perhaps judged her too harshly earlier.)

In a separate interview, Ms. Lacy demanded to know why Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, and Michael Wolff, a media columnist for Vanity Fair, who also attended the private dinner, did not feel the need to report on the occasion.

In his Twitter feed, Mr. Wolff said that he thought the dinner was off the record. In a phone interview, he added that neither he nor Ms. Huffington could have heard what Mr. Michael said.

“It was a private conversation between Ben and Emil, and no one was aware of the conversation until Ben published it,” Mr. Wolff said.

Ms. Lacy said she was not going to stop pressing, saying she believes that Uber needs to be held accountable. She thinks it is particularly significant that Mr. Michael has not been fired.

“It is clear that the board of directors is not going to act,” she said. “This is terrifying to me as a woman and a journalist.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Silicon Valley, Journalists Balance Booster and Critic. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe